Lynch girl, Countess Von Bismarck: 60 years of Laura Harring, ‘Mulholland Drive’ femme fatale

When she received the call from David Lynch’s assistant telling her that the celebrated movie director wanted to meet with her immediately, Laura Harring didn’t even have an agent. After more than a decade of trying to carve out a space for herself in the film mecca, with only a couple of roles in TV soap operas to show for her pains, the Mexican actress had put her dreams of becoming a star on the back burner. “I had already given up on Hollywood,” she confessed. In fact, she was working for free: “I was doing theater and something very experimental.” But Lynch had picked her face from hundreds of actresses’ headshots and, regardless of her paltry resume, decided that she would be his next leading lady. Harring was so excited at the prospect that on the way to the director’s offices, she crashed her car into another vehicle. “When his assistant told me that the script opened with my character driving and getting into a car accident, I got goosebumps,” she said.

A few years later, Harring did not only have an agent, she was a confirmed diva walking the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival. Mulholland Drive had just premiered and, although it had not yet achieved its status as a cult classic, hailed by the BBC as the best film so far of the 21st century, its protagonist was being compared with Hollywood golden age legends like Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth, the latter whose first name Harring’s character bears in the film. She appeared on magazine covers and the press assigned all kinds of descriptors —“bombshell,” “femme fatale,” “sex symbol”— to her explosive, amnesiac character, who is physically and emotionally rescued by the aspiring actress played by Naomi Watts. Both of their performances demonstrated how very wrong ABC executives had been to discard Mulholland Drive’s pilot — yes, in the beginning the project was meant to be a TV series — because, they said, the two thirty-something protagonists “were too old to be television stars.”

Harring took advantage of the opportunity to shine at the film festival and won over photographers with her womanly wiles: she shed her jacket, showing off her curves in a suggestive denim top and left red lipstick marks on Lynch’s face. “When we walked off, the press started clapping in unison: ‘Laura, Laura, Laura!’ So I came back, raised my arm, and blew them a kiss. They roared with excitement. The president of the festival said to me, ‘Where have you been all these years?’” the actress recalled. Her charismatic presence had completely overshadowed her co-star, so later, during dinner, Harring took Watts’s hand and made her amends. “I said, ‘Naomi things always come around, and someday it will be your turn to shine.’ And it was.”

More than two decades later, Laura Elena Martínez Harring, now 60 years old, is quite aware that Lynch’s masterpiece has guaranteed her the privileged position of cinematographic immortality. Despite the fact that she continued working after the film’s release, primarily in television and on films like Love in the Time of Cholera and John Q., the Sinaloa, Mexico-born actress never again made the kind of impact that she did with Lynch’s film. She will probably never rise above the label of “the brunette from Mulholland Drive,” as her co-star Watts undoubtedly has, but she seems to be at peace with that fact. “I left my mark in Hollywood, I’m in a classic,” she told The Independent in 2017.

Harring, who has only made one movie in the last five years, announced her retirement from acting last month. “It’s been a wonderful life and career! I appreciate every single crew member, actor and director and producer of every single film and television show... There’s a place in my heart for you always! #retired but not dead, and so much life left to live,” she wrote on her Instagram account. She uses the network to share daily advice on spiritual development, a self-identified practitioner of yoga, cosmic healing and other tools of personal growth, like manifestation.

The daughter of a farmer and a psychotherapist, Harring and her family emigrated to Texas when she was a child. At the age of 12, she was one of the ancillary victims of a shooting in a movie theater parking lot, receiving a bullet to her head that missed her brain by just a few millimeters. Soon after, her parents sent her to an exclusive Swiss boarding school and after graduating, she went to India to volunteer with the underprivileged. Upon her return to the United States, she decided to enter a beauty pageant in her hometown of El Paso, motivated by the chance it would give her to travel the country. She won the competition, followed by several others. Harring was crowned Miss El Paso, Miss Texas and finally, Miss USA in 1985, becoming the first Latina to win the title. It served as her entry into show business. At the age of 18, the actress married Count Carl von Bismarck, the great-great-grandson of the former German chancellor who was the architect of the 1871 unification of Germany. At odds over her professional future — the count didn’t want her to work — they divorced two years later. Harring has held the title of countess ever since, and never remarried.

Perhaps she’ll take advantage of her new time off-set to finally pen the autobiography she’s long made references to wanting to write.

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